Blog

Please complete the form below with any questions, comments, or inquiries. Required fields marked with *

Please wait, we are processing the form !!

Paradigm Computer Consulting Blog

Paradigm Computer Consulting has been serving the Bedford area since 1994, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Nothing lasts forever - especially your business’ technology. However, you shouldn’t just get rid of your old technology willy-nilly. This is mostly for two reasons: one, many of the components in our technology are really bad for the environment; two, carelessly disposing of technology is a great way to put your data at risk. In order to protect your data, you need to make sure that your old equipment is properly disposed of.

Email is a modern classic as far as business solutions are concerned, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an office that didn’t use it in some capacity or another. However, because email is so popular, it has become a favorite attack vector of malicious users. Fortunately, there are some basic practices that will help keep your email account secure and your communications private.

At the end of the day, do you shut down your computer or do you put it into sleep mode? Depending on what you need from your device the next day, you might want to consider which option benefits you the most. Here are some of the pros and cons of both approaches so that you can pick which one best suits your situation.

Social media might make it easy to stay connected, but it comes with a lot of negative side-effects--particularly in regard to security for both personal and professional use. If social media isn’t used properly, it could spell trouble for your organization. How can you foster proper social media usage so that your organization doesn’t suffer from poor security practices? It all starts by spreading awareness.

Email is a solution that needs to be protected, lest you expose important information to any onlookers while messages are in transit. Encryption is one of the key ways you can make sure that your messages are safe, but email hasn’t always used this method to secure messages. In fact, it wasn’t until relatively recently that encryption became a staple of the major email providers.

Your business relies on its data to succeed, which lends itself to the fact that your organization needs to have some sort of security measures put into place to guarantee its safety. 2018 is thought to be the year of ransomware, so it stands to reason that your business should prepare to deal with it. One of the best ways to deal with ransomware is to make sure that your company has a plan to restore data affected by said ransomware.

As a business adopts certain “best practices,” it is important for business leaders to consider why they are adopted, and more importantly, are they really for the best? There are many problems that subscribing to false best practices can produce, and so it becomes important to identify, adjust, and resolve them.

Physical security is more or less what it sounds like: security intended to protect the physical infrastructure that houses your business and your critical data. Many of the pieces of physical security will seem very familiar, even if you didn’t know the right terms for them.

Data security, always an important topic, has been made even more urgent by the Equifax data breach and the fact that 143 million users had their personal information stolen after entrusting it (or not) to Equifax. You need to consider what would happen if your business were on the receiving end of a data breach, and prepare to handle this truly unpleasant circumstance.

Some organizations want to better understand the process that they use to take backups of their data and restore them in the event of an emergency. This is great, because the value of being able to do so cannot (and should not) be understated. A proper data backup and disaster recovery system could be all that stands between prosperity and failure.

Putting together your workforce is something that requires painstaking attention to detail. You found workers who are willing to work as hard as possible to further your organization’s goals. Yet, you have to remember that even the most perfect employees are still human, and that they can make mistakes and can put the organization’s data at risk. User error is a common problem, and it is one of the most important things to keep in mind while you set up your information systems.

Security is one of the most crucial pain points of all businesses, but sometimes it can be tricky to implement solutions if you’re not sure what you specifically need. Network security isn’t easy, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be hard. If you have difficulty reinforcing a security state of mind in your office, we have good news for you; by keeping these tips in mind, you’ll be able to keep your business more secure than it would be otherwise.

It doesn’t matter where your business is located--chances are you’re susceptible to thunderstorms. Lightning storms are very unforgiving, and they can lead to all sorts of problems for unprepared businesses. We’ll discuss some of the ways that your organization could be affected by a lightning storm, as well as how you can take measures to mitigate these dangers in the future.

Just over a third (36 percent) of businesses don’t back up business data at all, and apparently this number isn’t keeping some IT providers up at night (not the case for us). Your businesses’ data is precious, irreplaceable, and extremely expensive to lose. Let’s talk about how delicate and dangerous it is to not have it backed up.

Hard Drives are Extremely FragileThe device inside your computer or server that holds your data is easily the most sensitive and breakable component. Traditional mechanical hard drives work by spinning a spindle of platters at extremely high speeds. These platters have a thin magnetic coating that stores your data. A tiny arm rests over the platter with nothing but a cushion of air holding it in place. The spinning of the platter keeps the magnetic head on this arm from touching the platter. If the head were to touch the platter while it is spinning, it would decimate your data.

Modern drives have plenty of safeguards to prevent issues, but like any mechanical device, wear and tear will happen, and outside forces like bumps and shocks can shorten the reliability of a drive. If your data is confined to one drive, it just takes one bad day to lose it all, and recovering the data could be impossible.

Users Make MistakesLet’s say your company uses a Word document as a template for your sales proposals. Your sales team knows to make a copy of it, drop it in the client’s folder, and edit it from there. That is, until someone makes the mistake of editing the original copy and saves over the file after making major edits to it. Now someone needs to scramble to restore the file by hand. If it were backed up, you could simply restore the file from your backup.

Ransomware is EvilEveryone knows they need to protect their computer with antivirus, but there are threats out there that can penetrate commercial antivirus solutions. One of the most common is ransomware, like Cryptolocker and Cryptowall. Both work in a similar fashion, commandeering your PC and locking your files from you unless you fork over cash. They can even infect other computers on your network and external storage devices, which could include your backup depending on your setup. Storing an off-site backup is critical for preventing this.

Is Anyone Checking Your Backup?If your IT company set up a backup solution, is it being tested and maintained? If you don’t have an agreement or aren’t getting a bill for it, the answer is probably not. Just like any computer, things can go wrong with your backup solution. Backups should be tested and evaluated regularly, or else you might find yourself out of luck in the event of an emergency.

Our powerful backup and disaster recovery solution can be just what you are looking for to protect your business from the myriad of threats out there. Call Paradigm Computer Consulting’s certified technicians today at (603) 647-8614 to learn more.

Business owners require ubiquitous access to certain information stored on their organization’s infrastructure. Thus, there’s an immediate need to safeguard this data from any sort of impending destruction. We’ll discuss ways that you can prevent the worst when it seems like your data will fall victim to a loss incident.

Here are three of the best ways your organization can protect its most critical asset: its data.

Have a RTO and RPO in MindThis has to do with the amount of data that you want to restore, as well as how quickly you plan on restoring it. With tape backup, you could take a backup of your entire infrastructure, which could take several hours or even days to restore in the event of a disaster. Furthermore, the tape might not even be as recent as you would like, which brings into question the backup system’s ability to get you back into operation with minimal data loss. Thus, tape fails to meet the requirements you put into place for your backup solution.

With a BDR, as part of your business continuity plan, you can ensure that you meet your recovery time objective (RTO) and your recovery point objective (RPO), optimizing your business’s ability to dodge downtime. This is why BDR is such a valuable tool for a business that wants to prolong its life cycle. Remember, a business that fails to recover their data following a data loss incident is likely to go out of business within a year.

Keep Multiple Copies of Your DataLet’s say that your office building is struck by a flash flood. You evacuate the building before anyone gets hurt, but you still feel forlorn that everything that you’ve worked so hard for is getting destroyed by something that you couldn’t predict. You could have prevented your business’s data being completely wiped out.

This exact scenario is why it’s important to not only have multiple copies of your data, but to store them in different locations as well. If you store your data backups on-site, and your infrastructure becomes subject to a disaster or hacking incident, where can you go for a solid backup of your data? Any good BDR solution will store your backups both on-site and in a secure data center for quick access in the event of a disaster, minimizing downtime.

Take Frequent BackupsIn the old days of tape backup, you could only take one backup every day. Furthermore, since the backup was so resource-intensive, you would have to wait until the end of the day to do it. This meant that you could lose out on an entire day’s worth of work, and furthermore, you’re relying on mistake-prone human beings to set the tape and start the backup. This isn’t the ideal way to handle such a critical task.

Instead, you want to take backups of your data at least as often as every fifteen minutes. Doing so means that you’re always using the most up-to-date version of your data possible, and that you’ll minimize data loss in the event of a disaster. BDR can accomplish this impressive feat, and can rapidly restore data directly to the BDR device, effectively eliminating downtime while you order replacement hardware.

If your business is ready to start taking data backup seriously, we highly recommend a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution from Paradigm Computer Consulting. With it, your data will be safe and secure, and you’ll be taking an important first step toward achieving business continuity. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 647-8614.

It’s National Clean Out Your Computer Day! To kick off this important day, we’d like to remind business owners that this is a valuable opportunity to make sure that you’re taking good care of one of your greatest assets: your company’s technology. Let’s go over some of the best ways that you can optimize the performance of your office computers.

We all know the dangers of doing business with the Internet. Even a small business has sensitive information that could potentially be stolen. While it’s important to take preventative measures to keep threats out of your infrastructure, it’s equally as important to have measures put into place that can detect threats within your infrastructure.

It can be easy to underestimate the importance of maintaining permissions on your network. In fact, sometimes it takes a good dose of misfortune to present the consequences of unchecked access to your network. This time, the misfortune befell PA Online, an Internet service provider located in Pennsylvania.

Having a workflow that works for you is the key to being successful. Sometimes, finding such a routine requires taking some rather extraordinary measures. If you’re looking for ways to tweak your workflow to be more productive, then consider these outside-the-box productivity tips from some of history’s very successful people.